


An Impulse Buy

by Night-Mare (Aoife)



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Deus Ex Machina, Gen, Pre-Canon, Real Science is Amazing, Sky Sawada Nana, Vongola Decima Sawada Nana, Wandering Shops (Discworld)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 04:32:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13287063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aoife/pseuds/Night-Mare
Summary: For the Prompt "An Impulse Buy Leads toIntergalacticWarfare."Decima Nana, courtesy of Daniela di Vongola and Kawahira's wandering shop ...





	An Impulse Buy

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. [Article on Women retaining Cells and DNA from their Children](https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/growth-curve/children%E2%80%99s-cells-live-mothers)
> 
> 2\. The concept of wandering shops is borrowed from Pratchett’s Discworld. GNU Sir Pterry.
> 
> 3\. One-shot for now, but I may return to it in the future.

At the end of their visit, her husband and his Boss leave her with a sick son; in place of her normally bright and bubbly Tsunayoshi is a boy she almost doesn’t recognise. He’s almost impossible to wake, and when she does manage to rouse him, he’s miserable, and tired, and so cold. 

The last one, the coldness, is the thing that really worries her. Her little boy has always run hot, not cold, and she carries him to the hospital, cradled in her arms (he’s so light still; how did she not notice how tiny her boy was?) concerned that one of their visitors had brought some strange bug with them from Italy (or had done something silly, like give her little boy alcohol; Iemitsu had certainly offered him some of the sake the men had been drinking the previous day; she’d intercepted that attempt, but she hadn’t always been able to supervise) and the nurses take him from her in the emergency room when they see the state he’s in and bustle him into a recovery room. Hours later they, tell her that they want to keep her little boy overnight, just in case (there’s something wrong. Very wrong. They’re just not sure what) and she’s kicked out of the hospital, despite her protests - the idea of leaving Tsuna alone with him in this state is more than a little terrifying, but it’s the end of visiting hours, and the staff are threatening to phone the resident Hibari, so she complies.

She eschews the bus, and instead chooses to walk the long route home. With her husband having returned to Italy with his Boss, and her little boy hospitalised, her house will be cold and dark and empty tonight and she can’t face that. Not yet. She finds her pace slowing as she meanders through only vaguely familiar streets, and that she’s looking around, noticing everything - from who has the best gardens, to which houses looked rundown and in poor repair; she figured that it was her mind attempting to focus on  _anything_  other than the memory of her baby in that big hospital bed.

The small shop is tiny and dark - tucked in between two houses - and she’s sure it wasn’t there before. Her curiosity and her desperate need for a distraction) get the better of her, and she takes the thin dirt path to it’s door; when she tries the handle, she half expects it to be locked. But it isn’t. She flinches as the bell above the door rings, and hesitates, but there’s something she  _needs_  inside the store. It’s the same need that drove her to talk to Iemitsu, that very first time that she saw him, and accept his wedding ring. And the same need that made her cry with happiness when she first held her sweet Tsunayoshi in her arms. 

She finds what she’s searching for at the back of the store, on a shelf at shoulder height. It’s one of seven silver rings with an odd crest that she feels she should recognise in a small, velvet-lined box, and she picks it up, and rolls the ring between her thumb and forefingers. “That Ring is special, Sawada-chan; that it’s even here is unusual; it’s nominal owner must have broken the pact. It should be on another’s finger, and you shouldn’t even have been able to pick it up; you’re not of Giotto’s blood, even if your little boy is.” She jumps slightly; she had known that the shopkeeper had to be in the shop somewhere, but she’d been so absorbed in finding the Ring, that he’d come up on her unexpectedly. He’s eyeing her thoughtfully, and she wonders how he knows that she has a son, and who Giotto was. “But then again, there is that theory that your human scientists have recently proven, about retained DNA and I suppose it’s possible that that would be enough. Especially if you were already a Sky, Nana-chan.” The man’s lips quirked into a smile that had too many teeth and his eyes were rimed in dark blue. “Put the Ring on, Nana-chan. Perhaps wearing it will kill you, and perhaps it’ll save your son and doom the Vongola; either way it’ll amuse me.”

She should put the Ring down. She should put it down and walk out of the shop, should return to the hospital and insist on being allowed to stay with her boy, even if it means negotiating with one of the Hibari for permission. But she’s never been good at ‘should’, and instead she slips it on, and it drags her down into a sea of orange flames and the shopkeeper laughs and laughs and laughs. 

There are screams and flashes of images and she wants to shut her eyes and turn her head away, but she can’t; she can’t close her eyes, and she can’t look away as men in uniform shoot other men, and a European villa burns; there’s blood everywhere. She can feel it underfoot, the rich carpet squelching as she’s forced to walk through the rooms and  _watch_. But she can’t just watch. She can’t, and she tries to change things. She can’t do very much, but what she can do, is kneel beside each of the fallen men, and share some of the orange Flames that had dragged her into the vision with them. The orange Flames don’t heal their injuries, don’t save them from their fates, but they do slip into death with soft smiles on their lips. She continues to drift through the vision, helping each man as she can until she comes face to face with another woman, who tilts her head in acknowledgement of her; she’s the first person who had actually seen her.

“It’s nice to meet another Vongola Donna, finally.” The other woman is younger than she is, and is wearing an old fashion suit, cut in a style reminiscent of uniform that she’s seen female american military personnel wearing, overdyed in red, and pointing a crossbow at her.

“I’m not -” Where she’d seen the Ring before finally registers; she puts it together with the fact that Iemitsu had called his Boss ‘Timoteo di Vongola’ in the European fashion. The realisation freezes her.

“The Ring disagrees. You couldn’t be here if it hadn’t accepted you. Nor could it have brought you here if you hadn’t accepted it.” The younger woman lowers her crossbow. “We’re ‘inside’ the Ring. This -” she gestures “- is, was, the Vongola Villa in 1941. The night that I took that Ring from my father’s corpse. I had always wondered why so many of my father’s men died with smiles on their lips. Just succeeding in buying enough time for me to escape wouldn’t have explained that.” There are tears in the younger woman’s eyes. “Thank you.”

She gives into her impulses and hugs the younger woman, who stiffens in her arms. “It wasn’t your fault -”

“I know.” The other woman swallows. “But I need you to do something for me, Decima; the Ring chose you over my son. Wear it well, and keep doing whatever it was you did to get it to accept you; obviously the Family needs that, now.” The scene fades and she reaches for the other woman, opening her eyes reflexively. The shopkeeper is staring at her with genuine surprise.

“Welcome to my shop, Vongola Decima. Apparently the scientists were right.” The man’s lips quirk up. “Which is absolutely  _fascinating_  and will have intriguing implications for the next Sky Arcobaleno. The Ring you’re now wearing will be ¥10,000. The ability to survive what it’ll bring? That will be a little pricier. In ten years, I will bring one of it’s kin to you. You will find someone to wear it, or wear it yourself … until then, love your son. And hate your husband, and kill your foes.”

(The shop isn’t there the next day when she walks back to the hospital, and the Ring won’t come off her finger. It’s six matching Rings are in her handbag, and when the Hibari is sent for and tries to remove her from her son’s bedside, there is orange fire. From both herself, and her son.)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] An Impulse Buy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13759287) by [Annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods)




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